TWENTY THINGS YOU OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT EARLSDON. • The first references, in the 14th century, are to the Aylesdene, a landscape of fields and scattered farms lying beyond the early Coventry suburb of Spon. • In 1852, the Coventry branch of the Freehold Land Society bought 31 acres of farmland and turned it into an estate of 8 streets, with 250 building plots. • Watchmaker John Flinn built the new settlement’s most imposing home, the double-fronted Earlsdon House, which, altered almost beyond recognition, still stands. • Spencer Park and the roads that run alongside are named after Coventry draper and philanthropist David Spencer, who gave the land for the park in 1852. • Hearsall Common, on the western edge of Earlsdon, was once notorious for the brutal art of prizefighting. In September 1881 Coventry weaver John Plant died after a fight there lasting 45 minutes. • From 1895, for a dozen or so years, the Common became the venue of a rather gentler sport. It was the site of Coventry’s first golf course, later moved to land off Beechwood Avenue. • Earlsdon remained a distant settlement from Coventry until the completion in 1898 of Albany Road, named after Helena, Duchess of Albany, a daughter-in-law of Queen Victoria, who visited Coventry that year. • The district had been formally absorbed into the city of Coventry eight years earlier, in 1890. • Earlsdon’s growing pretensions as a residential area gave rise to the expression ‘brown boots and no breakfast’ used by other Coventrians to bring Earlsdon folk down a peg or two. • Coventry’s first VC, former textile worker Arthur Hutt, was born in Earlsdon in 1889. • The district played a modest role in Coventry’s emerging cycle and motorcycle industries at the turn of the 20th century. The Allard and Clarendon companies, among others, had a manufacturing presence in the area. • Sir Frank Whittle, Father of the Jet Engine, was born in Newcombe Road in Earlsdon in 1907. • Earlsdon was also the birthplace, a year later, of Sir Frederick Gibberd, architect of Liverpool’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Heathrow Airport and Harlow New Town. • Earlsdon has produced many great characters over 150 years, none more memorable than the formidable Mary Jane (Ma) Cooper, landlady of the City Arms for 25 years from 1896. • The poet Philip Larkin, no stranger to Earlsdon as a boy, admitted later in life to once stealing a book from Earlsdon Library when he was a student at Oxford. • As well as Larkin, notable former pupils of King Henry VIII school in Earlsdon include former England cricket captain RES Wyatt, prominent scientist Colin Blakemore and rugby legend David Duckham. • A commemorative plaque adorns 51, Albany Road, once the home of Specials founder Jerry Dammers and now celebrated as the birthplace of 2-Tone music. • Earlsdon’s Criterion Theatre currently boasts two Coventry-born patrons, pop impresario Pete Waterman and actor Ron Cooke, a former member of the company. • Among the generations of Warwick University students who have lived in Earlsdon was writer Jonathan Coe, who later used the area as the main setting for his novel, A Touch Of Love. • The ECHO (Earlsdon, Chapelfields and Hearsall Opinion) is Britain’s longest-running community newspaper. .